212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

This, then, is the paradox that the greater our ethical idealism, the darker is the shadow that we cast, and that ethical monotheism became, in attitude if not in theory, the world's most startling dualism.

In the long run, hell and heaven are both seen to be traps, and final liberation comes with realizing that there is nothing to choose between them.

Life is not a matter of life or death; it is a matter of life and death, and ultimately there is nothing to be dreaded. There is nothing outside the universe, against which it can crash.

And the sage does not see himself as a little thing thrown into a vast and alien space: for him, the thing-space is a unity as inseparable as life-death, up-down, back-front, or inside-outside.

The cosmos is seel as a multi-dimensional network of crystals, each one containing the reflections of all the others, and the reflections of all the others in those reflections... In the heart of each there shines, too, the single point of light that every one reflects from every other.

This recognition of the two-sidedness of the One is what makes the difference between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of a religion, and the latter is always guarded and is alwaysmystical or ''closed'' [...] because of the danger that the opposites will be confused if their unity is made explicit. It is thus that mysticism is never quite orthodox, never wholly respectable.

On the one hand, to withdraw is a separative and thus essentially selfish position. On the other, to choose not to play rather than to play is still to choose, and thus to remain in duality. Therefore the most truly awakened sages are represented as coming back to participate in the life of the world out of ''compassion for all sentient beings,'' playing the game of good against evil, success against failure, in the full knowledge that it is a game [.]

Part of the difficulty seems to be that we educate a style of consciousness which ignores whatever is a constant sensation. Consciousness is ever upon the alert for new conditions in the environment so as to keep the rest of the organism I informed about adaptations that must be made, and this style of attention comes to eclipse the more open and total style of sensitivity that we have in the beginning.

[T]he paradox of civilization is that the more one is anxious to survive, the less survival is worth the trouble.